As usual, Stephen Hicks's article on Islam is on the mark. A fuller treatment of the issue is my article (which he cites), "Does Islam Need a Reformation?" [http://atlassociety.org/commentary/mo....

"In short, Islam does not need a Reformation. The problem is that it’s having one now. What it needs is an Enlightenment."

The West is certainly not free from the battle for reason over Biblical interpretations, or reading the entrails of chickens, or the thinking of the Fed, or the financial history charts of Wall St, or the emotional appeal to 'It's for the Children' or the dogs and cats, etc., etc.. .

We often talk about the 'Battle for the Minds of Men', but I'm convinced that we would be better off battling for the survival of 'Men with Minds. Few of us really grasp who the enemy really is that we face on a daily basis, or that we can't educate mankind in total out of the battle. We must retreat into a defensive stance that may well take generations to come to even a stalemate, but as long as we think that the rest of mankind can be led out of or even pulled out of the quagmire of living without their minds, attrition will destroy us. There is no realistic path towards winning this battle. There is only getting out of the way of the train wreck, whether it's Islam, Christianity, or care for your fellow man.

Nice article.

“He who wants to be a Christian must tear the eyes out of his reason.” Martin Luther

Interesting quote, but IMHO, when Luther made that statement he could have just as easily said “He who wants to be a Catholic must tear the eyes out of his reason.” because “Christian” and “Catholic” in his time and place would have meant the same thing. However, his protest and the protestant movement he gave birth to was an argument that “Christian” and “Catholic” were not the same thing and the two terms needed to be separated. He was an educated man who had read the words of Jesus Christ and effectively was holding a copy of the New Testament in one hand and pointing a finger at the Church rulers with the other and saying “Hey guys, somehow I don’t think what you are doing is what the founder of this outfit had in mind.” The Christianity of Jesus Christ had, over those 1500 years, morphed into something Jesus would never had approved of.

A contemporary example is Americans who are effectively holding up a copy of the Constitution and are pointing a finger at their rulers saying “Hey guys, somehow I don’t think what you are doing is what the founders of this outfit had in mind.” It’s had 200 years of morphing.

Now, “Christianity” or rather “Christendom” as I’d prefer because I contend there is or should be a difference in the definitions of those terms, has been rediscovering its roots over the 500 years since Luther’s time and even the Catholic Church is far more “Christian” than it was in those days.

I contend the statement “Christianity and Islam are not that different” is a false statement. Simply compare the teachings of the founders of those respective outfits and the differences would be quite clear to see. I say there was a time in history when Christendom and Islam were very similar, but Christianity and Islam were never similar.

Islam is a religion cobbled together from Judaism and Christianity. The similarity to Orthodox Judaism. is unmistakable. However, Mohammed included his own brand of barbarity into it and it hasn't changed in practice much since then. It remains a primitive Dark Ages creed meant for an age long passed. It needs to be brought up to date, but its very appeal depends much on its barbarity. As long as Sharia remains the rules of the religion/political system there is no possible way to bring it into the 21st century.

The whole idea of Religion is BAD. Its the abdication of reason and the adoption of blind faith as determined by some prophet a long time ago.

Islam adds to that intolerance with non believers and violence against them. Makes Islam VERY BAD.

I want nothing to do with Muslims at this point until they at least drop the intolerance and violence from their beliefs.

Politically incorrect as it may be, thats what I think, and I certainly dont want a bunch of syrian "refugees" being given a free ride in the USA courtesy of MY tax dollars.

Wow, that is not the brave goody two shoes Martin Luther I was taught about in an Alabama elementary school back in the 50s and I cannot recall anything else taught after that.
I grew up as a Catholic minority kid. Three or four nuns would come the church's adjacent Sunday school house and teach the Catechism for a couple of weeks every summer.
The one who said Martin Luther burns in hell may have been right.
I kinda doubted it at the time.
An elementary school teacher had already pointed out there is no Purgatory in the Bible for medieval people to buy your way out of.
So did Martin Luther.

excellent article that focuses on what specifically is wrong with vague calls for "change" and what the those calling for change (Obama) have in mind...stay focused on the message and whether the "changer" is being specific or evasive...

If you pinpoint the issue:
which is mysticism
you eliminate almost all this debate;
If that is really what you want to do
(which I don't think it is)

Stirring the pot/poking the glowing embers
only adds fuel/flavor to obsolete dogma.
Let it die the anti-intellectual death it deserves.
'Western culture' is still mostly creatures on their
knees in submission to something or other.
...keep the conversation going Mr.dbhalling et al.
However,
for others that know the meaning of Ayn Rand's
term Man-Worship there is an outlet away
from any speck of the
mystic/altruist/collectivist
and begins every day with
Reason/Egoist/Capitalist
as the moral premise.
...psycho-socially- an intellectual awakening.
Come and see it all for yourself.
In June, of course:
Inform yourself here:

www.GaltsGulchPortal.blogspot.com
ou en Français:
www.RefugeCanyonDeGalt.blogspot.ça
Spanish to come.

And I mean it.
JohnGalt Iamoura

One could argue, based on the Christian experience, that Islam is in the throes of reformation. Just as in the Christian reformation, the established faith hierarchy was challenged aggressively by radical extremists, with more than a century of bloody warfare before the force of reason came to bear, the current radical explosion may have to reach the point where reason begins to hold sway in Muslim society.

Yes, I agree with every part of the article: Galileos, Lockes, and Voltaires; NOT Luthers and Calvins.

When people want to dismiss Enlightenment values, they talk about "Western medicine" or "Western" notions of liberty, as if to say people on one side of the world push their regional preferences on others. But developing models to understand the world based on reason and observation is not a preference.

Thank you, Mr. Stephen Hicks.

A "belief," by definition, is neither truth nor fact, but it is powerful because it fills a need in the individual. There's something missing in their life: self respect, self esteem, a sense of being an individual. To quote Eric Hoffer: "Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority."

In other words, if I am in a mob, no one can point out my individual failure as an individual.

Unless and until a sense of "self" takes primacy, any collective will fill the void.

Islam was never about reason, islam is routed in pagan bicameralism, Old Testament Mysticism and never ascended into consciousness due to those mysticism's, their laws and politics.
Many do not get it but the Old Testament was not a religion...it was history.
Christianity was made into a religion and in doing so, surrendered the teachings to the same ole problems of whom have leaded that organization of the teachings. They too were pre-conscious bicamerally mystified.
That's not what Jesus was about. He derailed the religious leaders of Israel. It was not about a church. It was about moral behavior and using a growing connection to the mind to control the very temptations of the bicameral brain.
Did you know he advocated;...hold on to your hats here..."Rational Self Interest"? He spoke to a person on the road that passed right by someone by it's side that needed help and said something to this effect: You should help those fallen by the road side because someday you yourself might find yourself there. That in my mind, is rational self interest...not selflessness, not love but mutuality in your own interest.

Now, islam does need to reform itself and the 109 subversive versus that command one to do harm to another.
However, as I have studied and observed...we should all take an honest "Conscious" look at our history and the Conscious teachings of Jesus and take this whole moral thing, this image of how things have been created to reflect that image to a whole new level...eliminating this whole mystical bicameral speak and instead look to quantum physics and express what we do know and can logically assert at this time and be willing to adapt our understandings of the consequences of how creation was created with profound appreciation.

This has become a sideline to my work on understanding mankind's conscious evolution and how it has effected our evolving paradigm.

I could certainly see the principles of reason someday being packaged with the trappings of religion, for those who find such things comfortable. But we'd have to carefully avoid the whole list of fallacies that are most often used to sell religions, or it would not be reason.

Islam, though, is much more than a religion. It is a political movement that demands to rule the whole world. That is why I call for a reformation. Remember that Christianity and even Judaism once had (in the Mosaic laws) rules such as death by stoning for apostasy. They cleaned up their act. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I see that as a much more attainable goal than having all religion go away.

And I'm an atheist and have no ax to grind in favor of religion. I just believe that most religions these days are tame enough that we don't need to be at war with them.

His history is bad. Point is that 'reformed islam' is even more bloody violent is well taken.

You take Luther's quote completely out of context. In his time, the only official "Christianity" was that peddled by the Catholic Church. Luther had read the Bible, however, and compared it to the teachings of the Catholic Church and saw significant doctrinal discrepancies. So he left the Catholic Church in disdain, believing in the Bible verse that said that God could not be the author of falsehood nor the representative of Christ's true doctrines.

What led to the Enlightenment in the first place? It was the Reformers such as Luther, Calvin, and others who threw off the tyranny of the Catholic church and its extra-Biblical teachings in search of real truth. The Catholic Church actively persecuted scientific advancement because it undermined the traditions they had purportedly taught as doctrine, such as the idea of a flat world (the Greeks knew the earth was round and even calculated its circumference fairly remarkably given the tools), that the sun revolved around the Earth (the Mayans, Chinese, and others knew this to be false), and more. I would also point out that the printing press was created and its primary first use was publication not of scientific literature or news, but of the Bible. Once people began to read for themselves the true content of the Bible and compare it to Catholic teachings, it didn't take long for logical contradictions to surface. Only after the hegemony of the Catholic Church was broken (aided substantially by the cheap publication and dissemination of knowledge) did scientific progress begin to take off.

And why were people flocking to leave Europe to head for America? Religious freedom first and foremost. They were fleeing the Church of England (created by a king because he didn't want to be constrained by the Catholic Church's doctrine on divorce) and the Catholic Church of Europe with whom they held dramatic theological differences. But they were still predominantly Christians - with "Christian" not being defined by membership in the Catholic Church, but by a belief in Jesus Christ. They certainly weren't reciting the Qu'ran.

There were 252 documented suicide attacks last year alone. 250 were committed by adherents of Islam. Not a single one by a Christian. In fact, I don't know of a single suicide attack by a Christian in known history despite thousands upon thousands by Muslims, yet you want to claim that the two religions are the same? I would not have thought such blatant intellectual dishonesty from you. I'm very disappointed.

I think that Martin Luther was referring to how the Catholic Church isn't really "Christian" at all. a

In his day if you actually stop obeying them your reasoning toward self-preservation must go...(at least in his time...not so much now). They eventually killed Luther.

Not entirely true. Christians Brought reason and science forward a thousand years ago, partly because they wanted to recognize and explain their creator, and define it. Albeit, at times against a "christian" oligarchy, in the Catholic Church, that was driven as much by tradition as superstition as religion. This quote is not a statement of indictment, but in context, a statement of faith. If you do not use faith, you take it as a negative connotation.